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In response, the NRA filed a countersuit alleging the attorney general was hampering the group's First Amendment rights.

"while we review this filing, we will not allow the NRA to use this or any other tactic to evade accountability and my office's oversight."

The NRA said Friday it is in its "strongest financial condition in years," but the restructuring will help to "streamline costs and expenses."

The largest creditor listed on the NRA's bankruptcy filing is its former advertising firm, Ackerman McQueen, with which the NRA has been in a contentious legal battle after nearly 30 years in business together.

"The NRA, a get rich quick scheme for its executives that pushed positions wildly out of step with gun owners, is collapsing, just as Congress readies to vote on a comprehensive background checks proposal with 90% public support,"

fill the vacancy at the top of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which has been without a director for six years.

make gun trafficking a felony. Gun rights advocates agree that penalties for illegal use and possession of guns should be stiffened -- and so should penalties on those who are engaged in gun trafficking.

requires the federal government to compel states to submit all necessary records on felons, domestic abusers, the seriously mentally ill and others to the background check system.

step up its prosecution of gun criminals who try to buy guns. In 2009, 71,000 people who had been convicted of gun crimes tried to buy guns by lying on their background checks. Yet the federal government prosecuted only 77 of those cases.

crack down on rogue gun dealers.

. If President Obama and Congress fail to lead, 48,000 Americans will be killed with guns over the next four years.

In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.

Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.

The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.

It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.

But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.

The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.

When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”

When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.

The case is in question involves a 12-year-old girl known under the pseudonym Andrea, who was impregnated by her father and prevented from terminating her pregnancy.

On the other, the majority-Catholic country is not secular. And abortion continues to be taboo for health-care workers.

Andrea is depressed, says her mother, barely eating, suffering extreme nausea from the pregnancy and – critically – says she does not want to have the baby.

The case demonstrates that even when confronted with a 12-year-old incest victim, who says that she wants to die and to abort her pregnancy, Costa Rica’s legal and medical establishment do not offer legal or medical responses

Other Central American countries, including Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua also violate women’s rights by outlawing abortion under any circumstances, even when a woman’s life is in danger.

The highly visible international cases of Ana and Aurora have compelled the Costa Rican government to write a technical norm that it insists will further enshrine legal protection for medical personnel who perform an abortion to avoid endangering the life and health of a pregnant woman.

And none too soon; stories of dangerous clandestine abortions circulate.

A bill to ban bump-stocks was submitted to the US Senate on Wednesday by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

He said there was growing bipartisan consensus and that his office had been "flooded" with calls from other lawmakers interested in the bill.

They criticised politicians who are calling for gun control, writing that "banning guns from law-abiding Americans based on the criminal act of a madman will do nothing to prevent future attacks".

Bump-fire stocks, also called bump-stocks and slide-fire adapters, allow semi-automatic rifles to fire at a high rate, similar to a machine gun.But they can be obtained without the extensive background checks required of automatic weapons.

she added that she did not understand why anyone needed to own an assault rifle.

There is some support among survivors for banning bump-stocks but there is also a realisation that doing so does not amount to serious gun control.And all the while the killing continues. Fifty-nine people died here on Sunday.By Thursday afternoon at least 87 more people had been shot and killed across the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That's a Las Vegas massacre every three days.

Bump-stocks typically cost less than $200 (£150) and allow nearly 100 high-velocity bullets to be fired in just seven seconds, according to one company advert.